ustxtxb_obs_1955_11_16_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

`Quick, Allan, Send the Rangers The Unions Are inciting a Revolution!’ o quJlice outd t5e Mrade Let those flatter who fear, it is not an American art. JEFFERSON The sufferings of the Negro community of Mayflower from bullets fired from speeding cars at night in the last six months include one dead boy and two injured girls, and bullets in the school house, the school bus and the driver’s car, three Negro homes, and a mailbox. A woman was almost killed as she whispered her bedside prayers. The people are afraid and will not go out at night. The timing of some of the shootings so quickly followed decisive events in plans to build the Mayflower Negroes a new schoolhouse, the white superintendent of the school district was driven to say, for puolication, that it has been a scare campaign and coercion designed to frighten the Negroes out of their citizenship. The principal at Mayflower agrees and adds that during the period of the shootings, white men came into May-flower at night and awakened the Negroes and cursed them. There is a white community, Tatum, five miles up the road. It has not been shot into. There is a school bus for whites parked near the cafe where the Negro children were shot. It has not been shot into either. In the last shootings, the offenders fired into the bus and then into the school two miles away ; and the home they blasted that nightnext door to the schoolbelonged to John Beckworth, whom they may have mistaken for the principal, J. C. Beckworth, who lives nearby, off the road. Washington writer Sarah McClendon does not exaggerate when she reports the opinion that Texas now has a case far worse than Mississippi’s Till murder. The law enforcement officers of the area admitindeed, assertthat three weeks after the ‘last shooting, they have no suspects. “When I say nothin’, I mean nothin’,” said Gregg County ‘Sheriff Noble Crawford Nov. 12. It is therefore impossible for anyone depending on their information to know whether these shootings were racial in motive, and Crawford and Sheriff Herman Orr of Rusk County admit they don’t know. ” Yet Ralph Prince, the district attorney in Gregg County, told the Observer Nov. 8 that he expected an arrest in a week and that “I can see no possibility of a racial factor.” In the same breath, Prince admitted he didn’t know much about any of the shootings but the fatal oneeven though all the others the same night were assumed by his own sheriff to be from the same car. . Re-questioned, Prince exploded that he Wouldn’t answer any more NOVEMBER 16, 1955 Incorporating The State Observer, combined with The East Texas Democrat Ronnie Dugger, Editor and General Manager Sarah Payne, Office Manager Published once a week from Austin, Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $4 per annum. Advertising rates available on request. Extra copies 10e each. Quantity orders available. Entered as second-class matter April 26, 1937, at the Post Office at Austin, Texas, under the act of March 3, 1879. We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of man as the foundation of democracy; cve will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble hi the human “double-barreled” questions and accused a reporter of “stirring up such a stink.” He has commended the area newspapers for keeping “absolutely quiet on it,” so one can deduce. what he seeks : the suppression of what already stinks, Our State Attorney General, Mr. Shepperd, comes forth with an opinion without troublingto send out an investigator. “So far as I have been able to determine,” he said, “this was not a case of reprisal nor an act of terrorism involving rice relations.” He didn’t go very far to reach that conclusion when one remembers that the local law enforcement officers state they have no leads at all on the motive. The local law can’t find the killers. They can’t even run ballistics tests on the bullets that a passer-by say they don’t know that a registry of gun ownership is maintained at Austin. They do not act on the fact that a gun can be traced from its bullet. They say they’ve questioned every possible suspect in Tatum, yet the Observer hears from several townspeople of the roughest young tough in Tatum, interviews him, finds that he has a car of the same model, vintage, and color of the murder car’s description and he hasn’t even been qusetioned_ by police! Thus a Negro-baiting East Texas area is visited with the violent consequences of its prejudice and quivers in nervous fear. It is a hideous and sub-human crime that has been committed. It is a contradictory and defensive -bunch of people they have to enforce the law. It is a sorry Attorney General who judges such a case without so much as an investigation of his own. What happened before Oct. 22 the shootings that were not stopped is a disgrace to the civilized conscience. What happened Oct. 22the murder and wounding of innocents seems but another consequence of the nurture of prejudice in the incubus of community life. But what has happened since Oct. 22the initial suppression by the press,. the insupportable denials of the most obvious motive theory, the spectacle of an Attorney General willing to mouth these denials without making his own inquirythese things are a blot on the honor of this free state. How such a thing can happen and such a people as Texans stand for it, how such a race as human can dodge and shift and deceive in such a heinous case, we do not know. If justice is done it will be a miracle. We ctn . only hope the car speeds not again at night, the bullets flaming low and hot. Staff Correspondents : Bob Bray, Galveston; Anne Chambers, Corpus Christi ; Ramon Games, Laredo Clyde Johnson, Corsicana ; Mike Mistovich, Bryan; Jack Morgan, Port Arthur ; and reporters in Dallas, Houston, Beaumont, El Paso, Crystal City, and Big Spring. Staff Contributors : Leonard Burress, Deep East Texas ; Minnie Fisher Cunningham, New Waverley, Bruce Cutler, Austin ; Edwin Sue Goree, Burnet; John Igo, San Antonio ; Franklin Jones, Marshall; George Jones, Washington, D.C.; J. Henry Martindale, Lockhart ; Dan Strawn, Kenedy ; Jack Surnmerfield, Austin ; and others. Staff cartoonist : Don Bartlett, Austin. Cartoonists : Neil Caldwell, Austin ; Bob Eckhardt, Houston ; Etta Hulrne, Austin. MAILING ADDRESS: Drawer F, Capitol Station, Austin, Texas.. EDITORIAL AND BUSINESS OFFICE: 604 West 24th St., Austin,. Texas. Phone 7-0746. HOUSTON OFFICE: 2501 Crawford St., Houston, Texas \(Mrs. R. D. Randolph, director, subscription Bartlett Appears Exclusively in The Texas AUSTIN The following dispatch was _published Nov. 12 in the El Paso Times. It was written by Sarah McClendon, Washington correspondent for the Times and other Texas daily newspapers: 1.1 BY SARAH MCLENDON WashingtonJustice, like charity, the Department of Justice told Texans this week,. begins at home. ‘ This was by way of answering complaining Texans who wanted the Department, if local East Texas law enforcement agencie’s did not act, to step in and see that the persons who have been killing and wounding Negroes and terrifying innocent citizens in the Mayflower community were brought to justice. This community which lies near the Gregg-Rusk counties line, 10 miles from Longview, has now a record far surpassing the Till murder in Mississippi, several Texans informed the Justice Department’s civil rights section. Its record over six months includes : one 16-year-old boy, John Reese, killed ; his cousins, two Negro girls, 15 and 13, wounded; one Negro woman kneeling by her bed at night saying her prayers, barely escaped; three Negro children who often sleep in a room riddled with bullets, barely escaped ; a Negro home, school, school bus, and mailbox shot into ; a white school . and white school tax assessorcollector’s home painted with obscenities ; other shootings in recent months involving another school bus and assaults designed to terrify both white and Negro citizens. A COPY OF the Texas Observer, Austin, of Nov. 2 was handed this week” the Justice Department’s civil rights section. It said that the regular press in Texas had given the death of Reese scant attention. But the Justice Department men shook their heads sadly. Unless there was a federal angle or a state official involved, they could do nothing. Actually, the federal government had no right in the matter they said. They wished they could. One official said this is not so unusual in the .South today. There was another case recently where Negro children were, the victims. And then there was the Phoenix City, .Ala., case in which the federal government tried to intervene but could not, and the Mississippi Till case in which the federal government had to keep hands off. Federal officials said even if they entered cases on surelegal , at times, there was also the additional difficulty of getting a grand jury to indict. Then one official quoted the carved quotation over the front entrance of the . Department : “Justice in the life and conduct of the state is possible only as first it resides in -.the hearts and souls of the citizens.” “We never had much co-operation from Texas anyway, from Governor Shivers on down,” added an unnamed official. THEY RECALLED how when some citizens recently asked the Department to investigate the forma= tion of Citizens Councils and any possible re-establishment of Ku Kluxism in TeXas, that Attorney General John Ben Shepperd notified the Justice Department that Texas could enforce its own laws and needed no help from Washington. On that occasion, Justice officials replied that they were delighted to hear that Texas could enforce laws adequately. Later in the week, Shepperd was reported by the Observer to have said he found no racial angle. Racial or not, pleaded a few Texans at the Justice Department, a murder has been committed and it may be only, outsiders who can conduct an investigation, so strong would local pressures be. It might be some one has already asked the Federal Bufeati of Investigation to look into this matter. Civil Rights section superiors said they likely would know of it if that had been done. Finally, Civil Rights attorneys agreed to look at the Observer and to study the matter to see if there was any federal angle. But they didn’t offer much hope. Postal inspectors agreed to look into the shooting of mail boxes. Meanwhile, Negro residents are afraid to go out at night and white people are wondering just who will be the next innocent victim of shooting, My gins Mhsgraer Observer Washington Writer Says Reese Murder, Worse Than Mississippi’s Till Case